Cosmic Jaguar Brings Mayan-Inspired Art, Music and Shamanism to Modern Society

Inspired by his natural environment, the Mayan culture, calendar and human ancestry, Carlos Cedillo started his personal brand Cosmic Jaguar. The New Braunfels, TX local creates art, music and writings that speak to these deep-rooted passions in his life. He is especially inspired by the number 13, which he believes "signifies the union of masculine and feminine, the cosmic and transcendent." His life's work was born out of a trip to study the Mayan culture 20 years ago.

"In the mid-1990s, I began studying the Mayan culture of Mexico and Guatemala," Cedillo says. "The most important feature of their culture is the calendar that notoriously did not end in 2012, but began as a new cycle. My painting career began because of the pictorial nature of the Mayan writing system, known as glyphs. In May of 2000, I created a mural to commemorate a clustering of planets in the sign of Taurus. I then started stretching my own canvases and painting the glyphs and Mayan iconography."

Cedillo expands Cosmic Jaguar to also include an unusual type of spontaneous music called Jam-tronica. He has several songs on his website, available for purchase and available to listen to on SoundCloud. These bits of inspired and spur-of-the-moment tunes are another outlet for Cedillo to express how he sees himself in relation to the artistic world.

"Jam-tronica is a form of improvisational music that incorporates modern synthesizers, computers, even an iPad, and other electronic instruments with acoustic and traditional band instruments," Cedillo says. "These days I mostly play along with an iPad and sitar. It would be called Jazz, but there are not the traditional song structures that we are familiar with- verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus. In Jam-tronica, the emphasis is creating music on the spot. I used to call this 'spontaneous composition.' Space-jazz is another way to describe it. Certainly it is more than contemplation and meditation rather than dancing and partying."

For Cedillo, his art is not just a passion, but his lifestyle. His website features a large portion of his work, from art to music, and how to reach him should you be interested in his services. He acts as an urban shaman, speaking to people and helping them find answers through a deck cards, the same way his environment speaks to him.

"I get inspired by Mother Nature and Earth Magic and also messages in my dreams," Cedillo says. "Nature provides infinite mysteries and Earth herself speaks through animals, the stars and planets, earthquakes, volcanoes, the wind and rains, the oceans, lakes and streams. My dreams often have carried prophecies and connections to space civilizations. Writings and pictorial messages from ancient cultures seem to be connected to nature in profound ways that we need to rediscover, and that is the main purpose of my artwork."